'2046,' the latest film from Chinese author Wong Kar-Wai, is intricately woven, gorgeously filmed, and innovatively structured. Unfortunately, it leads its audience not to care about anything happening onscreen. Worse yet, this film could have been brilliant had Kar-Wai not prevented a little thing called 'humanity' from even making a guest appearance in this oftentimes suffocating intellectual endeavor.
'2046' begins with a promising premise: pulp fiction writer Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) lives in 1960s Hong Kong and is reeling from rejection by his last lover. He lives in a dingy, smoke-filled hotel room, bedding any beautiful woman within a ten-mile radius while reflecting upon the fragile, often cruel nature of relationships in his sci-fi writings. He entitles his novel '2046,' naming it after the hotel room next to him where a past lover was stabbed to death by her jealous boyfriend.
Gruesome? Yes. Compelling? Check. Kar-Wai's directing renders Chow's hotel room with delectably shady graininess and paints the futuristic world of '2046' in stark whites and lonely neon colors that gives the setting a 'Blade Runner'-esque sense of isolation and dehumanization. Cinematography is definitely not this film's problem: everything here is visually stunning but emotionally uninteresting.
Kar-Wai, who also wrote the film's screenplay, plays with the idea of how past experiences inform our perception of the future, but he fails to expand this thought into an engaging film.
'2046' is a plethora of high-minded concepts for viewers to ponder, but it forgets to root these concepts in compelling characters or interesting scenarios. That is not to say the characters in the film are flat. Quite the contrary, each character has complex motivations that the actors expertly handle.
The problem stems from the complexity each character flaunts: at no point do you actually care what happens to anyone because you're not sure what they want or expect. Many films succeed without characters the audience can relate to, but those films usually provide something else worth watching. For example, no one cares what happens to the characters in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but it becomes impossible to turn away from watching an insane computer try to kill astronauts.
Kar-Wai, on the other hand, insists upon shrouding each of his characters in so much film noir mystery and uncertainty that it is difficult, if not impossible, to really determine what is driving any character. This stylish mystique succeeds in dehumanizing the film.
Kar-Wai attempts to rectify this through Chow's voice-over narration, but the straightforward nature of the voice-over does not well fit this otherwise challenging film. These moments come off more as an admission of the muddling nature of the film than welcome explanations.
The film's real sin, though, is that it takes itself far too seriously. Of course, a drama about failed romance does not lend itself to many laughs, but the intellectual themes and contrived, stultified interactions between characters feel more stifling than enlightening.
This is a film more concerned with making its intellectual intentions clear than letting the viewer explore the same themes and characters that Kar-Wai seems so preoccupied with.
Overall, '2046' is a film memorable for its gorgeous cinematography and stunning failure to engage the viewer in anything else.
